Research, Therapies & Thought Leaders

Explore researchers, therapists, methods, intellectual lineages, evidence, and critical practice that connect rigorous inquiry with responsible application.

Null Findings in Sensuality Research

A null finding is not an empty result. It may show that an intervention has no detectable effect, that an effect depends on context, or that a popular claim was larger than the evidence allowed.

Researcher Positionality in Embodied Inquiry

Researcher positionality names how identity, history, embodiment, institutional power, and relationship shape what can be noticed, asked, interpreted, and published. It is not a confession or a claim that rigour is impossible.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen developed Body-Mind Centering, an approach to movement exploration and consciousness that works with developmental patterns, anatomy, touch, voice, and attention. Her contribution gives sensuality a richly embodied vocabulary while requiring care about metaphor, teaching scope, consent, and individual difference.

Juno Obedin-Maliver

Juno Obedin-Maliver is an obstetrician-gynaecologist and researcher whose clinical and scientific work focuses on the sexual and reproductive health needs of sexual and gender minorities. Through inclusive gynecology, longitudinal research, and the PRIDE Study, she brings visibility to care experiences often excluded from standard models.

June Reinisch

June Reinisch is a psychologist and former director of the Kinsey Institute whose leadership broadened the institute’s public mission across sex, gender, reproduction, education, and cultural collections. Her work illustrates how sexual knowledge is built not only through experiments but also through archives, public communication, interdisciplinary research, and attention to reproduction and embodied life.

Marta Meana

Marta Meana is a clinical psychologist and sex researcher whose work examines sexual desire, sexual pain disorders, women’s sexual health, cognitive processing, and the limits of drive-based models. Her biopsychosocial and systems approach connects physiology, relationships, culture, meaning, and eroticism.

Context

Context is the field of conditions that gives an experience its meaning and consequences. Sensuality cannot be understood apart from bodies, relationships, culture, power, place, time, and available choices.

Bartenieff Fundamentals

Bartenieff Fundamentals are principles and movement explorations developed by Irmgard Bartenieff, a dancer and physical therapist who extended Rudolf Laban’s work. They investigate whole-body connectivity, developmental patterning, breath, support, and efficient movement without prescribing one ideal body. The approach is educational and should be adapted to each person’s ability and context.

Repair After Embodied Harm

Repair after embodied harm begins with recognising what happened and its impact. It does not demand forgiveness, renewed contact, or emotional labour from the person harmed.

Ethics of Intimate and Embodied Data

Intimate and embodied data include more than names and questionnaires. Voice, movement, location, touch, physiology, images, and sensory accounts can expose identity, health, relationships, and vulnerability long after collection.

Do you prefer to listen?

If you prefer to listen, many of these themes are also explored through voice in the Sensual Institute podcast, where spoken reflections and audio transmissions offer another way to meet the material.

Reading engages the mind; listening allows the body to receive the same ideas through a different channel.

Both belong to the same body of work.

They simply meet you differently